Delhi polls: AAP leads on Twitter, Facebook, but is it enough?

Delhi goes to elections tomorrow and while all campaigning has stopped on the ground, social media such as Twitter and Facebook is where the battle still continue to rage. According to the Twitter trends for today, hashtags #Vote4AamAadmiParty and #AAPSweepingDelhi have been trending consistently all day on both Delhi and India trends. #Vote$AaamAadmiParty has been the number one trend all day. In fact the tweets have been steadily increasing going from 22,000 at around 10.45 to 32,000 around 4.00 pm. (Source Twitter’s mobile app which reflects the number of tweets around a trending topic as well) One did see #DrSaheb4Delhi for BJP’s CM candidate Dr HarshVardhan make a brief appearance on the top trends list for Twitter, but it disappeared soon. AAP’s Facebook page has currently has over 535,264 likes and over 158,390 people talking about it, and posts seeing close to 1200 shares. The most popular city for AAP is New Delhi and the age group that is most popular with AAP with 18-24 years old. In contrast Dr HarshVardhan’s page hasn’t fared too well and managed to garner a measly 13,169 likes. A pro-Congress page called Friends of Delhi, which was started in the first week of November has perhaps been the only strong social media competitor for AAP. Friends of Delhi has garnered over 200,000 Facebook likes and is also most popular in the age group of 18-24. But again when it comes to the level of engagement, the shares for the posts are in two digits only. On the two big daddies of social media which is Facebook and Twitter AAP’s strategy seems to have clicked. According to Ankit Lal, who is the IT admin for the party, the final push for the party’s social media strategy came with a campaign via Thunderclap. Explaining it he says, “We did a campaign on Thunderclap which did the trick for us. Thunderclap is a platform on which you can run campaigns. In this, people join a campaign through Facebook or Twitter and a Tweet or Facebook status goes out at the time the campaign matures.” Lal says that AAP’s campaign on Thunderclap, “matured at 4:00pm on 2nd December and it had 10,151 campaigners with a total social media reach of 35,15,135 people. So the tweets and FB statuses went on walls of 10,151 people whose total social media reach was more than 3.5 million.” In short even though 10, 151 people joined AAP’s Thunderclap campaign, their social media networks and connections which totals 3.5 million, were what helped AAP’s boost. [caption id=“attachment_1264261” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational image. AFP[/caption] AAP seems to have gone for a volunteer based approach that has worked for it. Where rivals Congress and BJP are concerned, Lal says, “BJP of course has a bigger team and they have been trying to trend #DrSaheb4Delhi and #BJP4Delhi but have been unsuccessful in sustaining it for long. #SheilaFirSe also trended for some time and was top trend in Delhi but it didn’t do well in India trends. You need to be persistent and coherent in your approach otherwise the message will get lost in this sea of data, as it is happening with the Congress campaign.” Of course there, is still the point that not all of these connections might be based in Delh. Lal says that, “Though exact reach is difficult to tell as city wise data of reach is not available in real time but in past one week we have reached to 5.7 million people across the world.” For a party that is just starting out and is dependent on donations for funding, 5.7 million is no small number. There’s also a plan to get people to vote and spread awareness via social media. “We have already asked the office goers to take leave and if the HR doesn’t allow then give reference of section 135B of Representation of People’s act. We have also posted a screenshot of the EC notification on the AAP page.” says Lal. What remains to be seen is whether the fence sitters will just prefer to tweet and share or if they will actually hit the polling booths.